by Andy Andrews
“How long have you been here?” Sealy demanded. “How long have you been standing right here?”
“The whole time,” Jones admitted.
“That’s not true,” Christy said accusingly. “You left us alone out here.”
“No, I didn’t,” Jones replied. “I was around. I always am.”
“That’s the same thing you said to me the other night,” Christy noted.
“You’re right,” Jones said to Christy. “It is exactly what I said to you the other night.”
Jones waited for anyone else to speak up. When no one did, he brushed off a place on the ground, eased to one knee, and asked, “So . . . what are you going to do?” There was still no response. “Maybe now’s the time to quit and go back the way you came. You know for sure what’s behind you. It can’t be any worse . . .
“On the other hand, you have no clue what lies ahead.” He cocked his head and smiled mysteriously. “And it could get a lot worse. Truly, you don’t know whether this thorny chaos will last five more minutes or five more hours.”
He stood up and addressed the three of them. “As I said, you were never alone. In fact, my eyes have been on you at every moment. Less than thirty minutes ago, when this particular part of your journey began, you were close enough to me that, had you asked, I would have held your hand or even carried you.
“At the beginning I asked you to do one thing. As you stepped into the unknown, I issued a single, very simple instruction. That instruction, as casual and unimportant as it might have sounded to you only half an hour ago, continues even now to be the critical component that will determine your future, which begins with the success or failure of tonight’s adventure.”
Jones looked carefully at the three people before him. They were damaged and dirty, exhausted and wary, but he loved them even when they ignored him or rejected his efforts to help as they had done this evening. With a patient smile the old man simply explained the path they had chosen and the immediate results that choice had produced.
“Ignoring my instruction, your minds quite naturally drifted from the safety that wise counsel can provide. Of course, your physical actions quickly followed, and just that quickly”—Jones snapped his fingers—“you were in trouble.
“Darkness commands an inordinate amount of attention from a person who is unprepared and unprotected. Attention to darkness produces doubt. When a person is distracted and weakened by struggles, doubt whispers a message logically urging surrender; and soon, that person’s focus is on his own discomfort, his fear and anger, regret and resentment.
“That is precisely what happened with you,” Jones noted. “‘Follow me,’ I said. It was my only request. When you did not, the inevitable occurred, and you lost sight of me completely. To you, it seemed as though I were not there at all. Yet, even then, had you only stopped to call my name, I would have made my presence known, and your vision—your vision that sees even in the darkness—would have returned.”
Without a glance away from them, Jones pointed in the direction of the bay. “For I know well the plans I have made for you,” he said. “These are plans to prosper you—not to allow harm to come to you—but plans to give you hope and an incredible future.”
Jones picked up his duffel bag. “So let’s try this again, shall we? Follow me,” he said and turned as if to go. Incredibly, still, the three hesitated, glancing nervously at each other.
“Where are we going?” Baker asked.
“Son,” Jones said with a sigh, “if we leave right now, all will be well. But if you continue to question everything I say, you will not accomplish anything. Is it not enough that you know I would not get you up in in the middle of the night and bring you through all of this without some purpose?”
Baker was in pain. His wife was bleeding. Christy was in no better shape. “Jones . . . I just don’t understand.”
“Yes, I know that you don’t,” Jones replied, “but it’s an odd thing you’ve been unable to grasp . . . See, I’m not requiring you to understand. I am simply urging you to obey. For it is only when you obey that, eventually, you begin to understand.”
Jones gestured for them to come close. When they had gathered in a tight group, the old man pointed in the direction of the wind and spoke. “The bay is there. You did not know how close you were when you quit. There is still time. There is more difficult terrain to traverse. Yes, before you are out of this wilderness, you might stumble, and you may fall. But listen to me . . . you make it to that bay even if you have to crawl.
“Every step you take is a step of faith. If you can’t see in front of you, walk on, and just believe. Don’t despair. Whisper words of prayer. And when you get there . . .” Jones shook his head, laughing softly. Placing his arms around them, he squeezed and finished what he had been about to say. “When you get there, the miracle, I promise, will be waiting in the water.”
With renewed determination, and only minor difficulties compared to what they had already experienced, the small group was out of the thick woods in only a few minutes and found themselves on a road. Stopping briefly to inspect each other with their flashlights, they were amazed to be walking around. “We look like escapees from a trauma unit,” Sealy said. Then they hobbled as fast as they could toward Jones, whose flashlight they could see bobbing its way through a wooded lot.
When at last they reached the bay, Jones got down on his knees to open the bag. “Sticks, please,” he said. “Just point them down here.” By the light of Christy’s lantern, Jones fastened a sharp spike of some sort on the end of each stick.
“Woohoo! I’ll get a ghost for sure with this,” Christy said. “I am looking dangerous now. Who are we fighting, Jones?”
The old man smiled and said only, “Turn them around, please. I need the other end.” Out of the duffel came wire frames. Shaped in a circle except for one flat side, the frames were threaded with a small white net. Each attached snugly to the end of the stick that was opposite the spike.
“A net?” Baker said. “A net and a javelin. This is a very curious contraption for the middle of the night.”
Jones closed the duffel bag and stood. “It’s not the middle of the night anymore, Baker,” he said. “It is four thirty-nine in the morning.” Baker pushed the button on his watch that illuminated the digital numbers. It was, he saw, 4:39 a.m. Jones emptied the onion sacks—bags of heavy plastic mesh—onto the ground. “Each of your names has been written on the labels of five sacks. Grab one of yours and tie it to your belt or onto a belt loop,” he instructed. “The pile of extras will be here, but always be sure to use your own.”
“Use it for what?” Sealy asked but received no answer.
“Jones,” Christy said fearfully, “are we supposed to go into the water? I can’t go in it, Jones. I just can’t.”
Jones responded, but his answer was directed to everyone. “Yes, I want everyone in the water. Go in now, please, and spread out. Allow thirty or forty feet between you. About knee-deep will be perfect, and carry your sticks and lights with you.”
Jones drew Christy aside and placed his hands on her shoulders. She was trembling. “Look at me, Christy.” She did, but the tears in her eyes made it hard to see. “Christy, you will be fine,” Jones said. “The water will not be deeper than the middle of your thigh. To make sure you feel safe, however, I will ease out past where you are and keep you between myself and the shore.” He gestured toward the Larsons, who were already wading in, and said, “Go.”
Christy took several uncertain steps before stopping for a bit more reassurance. “And you’ll be with me?” she asked. “Seriously? You’ll be close?”
The old man smiled and nodded. “I always am,” he said.
When all three were in the water, they waded around, looking at minnows or hermit crabs for several minutes, but they were exhausted, in pain, and soon tired of what little fun this was to begin with. Jones was beyond them in water almost to his chest. He did not have his light, but they knew where he wa
s and, this time, kept him in sight.
The water was warm—almost hot—and the east wind had died to almost nothing. The surface of the bay looked like glass, the only ripples at all caused by three people standing in the dark with a spike and a net.
“Jones?”
“Yes, Christy?”
“My feet hurt.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“Jones?” came another voice.
“You’ll be okay too, Sealy.”
“What are we doing out here?” Christy asked. “Brady is going to kill me. I have joined the crazy club. I am as crazy as—” and she screamed. Sort of . . .
The vocal oddity produced from the throat of the beautiful young woman at that moment was accomplished without the slightest pause for breath. In fact, her cry might have made the others laugh hysterically had it not unnerved them so completely.
The scream itself was less “classic shriek” than “weird, strangled exhalation of total surprise.” Performed in midsentence, without the benefit of even the quickest breath taken to power its sound, in reality, the bizarre squeal was simply the resonate result of classic overreaction and would have been a more appropriate vocal choice to accompany the instant of one’s grisly death.
“Christy! Are you all right?” came Sealy’s voice.
Christy had high-stepped several feet away when she screamed, creating huge geysers of water. If they had been sure a shark had not attacked, it would have been funny. Christy was soaking wet, standing like a statue with her spear at the ready, illuminated by two shaky flashlights and her old gas lantern. Baker and Sealy were frozen, too, unsure whether to rescue their friend or run for their lives.
“Something hit my leg!” Christy said, still not moving.
Suddenly Sealy yelled and danced a quick circle. “There are things down there,” she said, bending over with her light. “I see some things. They were on my foot. Oh my—they have glowing eyes! What are those things?”
The attention was evenly divided between Christy and Sealy until Baker jumped. “Okay, that was big. Jones? Whatcha got going here?” He heard the old man chuckle from somewhere in the dark.
Sealy was still looking down at her feet. “Christy! Come here! Bring your big light. I can see these things, but I can’t see what they are.” Hesitating, Christy moved toward Sealy, who was poking her net at whatever she was seeing. “I think it’s—” Before she could finish her statement, one of whatever they were flicked across the top of the water and right into Sealy’s net. “It’s a shrimp!” she yelled. “Baker! I caught a shrimp. He’s huge.”
Christy had just made it to Sealy’s side and shined the lantern, which was much brighter than the flashlights, into the net. “How cool,” she said. “Oh, he is big.”
“Christy, be still . . . Oh . . . Christy, look.” Sealy grabbed Christy’s hand that was holding the lantern and slowly swung the light away from the white net. Christy gasped. “The eyes are from shrimp,” Sealy said. “Those are all shrimp!” She looked around for her husband and found him when she heard a splash.
“Guys!” Baker said. “Look at this!” Up and out of the water, into the air he swung the pointed end of his stick and hanging from it was a flounder the size of a dinner platter.
“What kind of fish is that?” Christy hollered to Baker. “Those are all around me.”
“It’s a flounder, Christy,” Baker said. “Gig them!”
“What?” she responded. Christy wasn’t sure whether she was horrified or not.
“Gig ’em, girl,” Sealy said, brandishing her stick. “That’s what the sharp end is for. It’s a flounder gig. Goodness gracious, look at the fish!”
“It’s a jubilee!” Baker yelled. “Look! Everything is headed to shore!”
It was, and they were. For about seventy yards of shoreline, right where they stood, the calm water was literally beginning to quiver. There were blue crabs and whiting mingled in, but most of what they saw at first were shrimp and flounder. Within five minutes the sea creatures were so thick around their legs that it was difficult to walk.
The flounder were stacking on top of each other, and Baker was often putting four and five at a time in the onion sack tied to his waist. Sealy and Christy were having no less success, and, in fact, it was Christy who dragged the first full sack onto the shore. She quickly tied another bag marked with her name onto a belt loop and hurried back into the water.
Sealy had developed her own technique for capturing the shrimp. She put the net straight down beside her feet and held the stick firmly with one hand at the top and the other down by the net. She walked forward slowly making the net drag on the bottom, and by the time she had moved six feet, the net would be full. Sealy was putting more than five pounds of shrimp at a time in her onion sack. Within twenty minutes, her first bag was tied off, filled with more shrimp than she could drag out of the water by herself.
As the jubilee started, Baker recognized what was happening and said to his wife and Christy, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, ladies. Remember what you’re seeing here, but work while it’s happening. The seafood markets will buy everything we can get.”
It was all the encouragement they needed. They saw stingrays, too sluggish to hurt anyone, and crabs with claws as big as chicken legs, lying in the shallows as if asleep. Huge schools of mullet, hundreds of fish at a time, swam slow circles around the top, kissing the surface of the water for the oxygen they were seeking. But it was the shrimp, layering the bottom like thick carpet, and the flounder in six inches of water, stacked like giant pancakes, that astounded them.
As dawn began to break, they worked faster. Even in the water they were hot and teased Jones about staying cool in the deeper water. They were intent on making the most of a situation whose end could come at any minute. There were twelve sacks full of shrimp and flounder stacked onshore when Jones said, “The tide is changing. Give it all you’ve got. This won’t last much longer.”
The morning light was increasing by the minute, and Christy was as tired as she had ever been in her life. When Baker staggered by to put another sack on the shore, he offered to take her gas lantern. At first she didn’t understand, but he pointed with the gig to the flounder scattered around them and said, “Look. You don’t need it. Let me put it with the bags.”
He was right, and everyone quickly discarded their lights. Without the awkwardness of two hands doing three things, they were moving freely and much faster. When the jubilee had begun, they heard Baker say that the local seafood dealers would buy what was harvested, and they were all working with a purpose.
Sealy gathered the shrimp and flounder with Christy. Both women were thinking about their businesses and the possibility that this miracle from nowhere might fund their starts. They were not sure, however, exactly what this might be worth, and neither wanted to stop for a second to ask Baker if he knew.
It would not have mattered. Baker did not know either. He had fished all his life, but he had never sold any of what he had caught. It was always eaten right away, put in the freezer, or given to friends. Baker knew that seafood was expensive in restaurants, but how much anyone might pay for a flounder or a pound of shrimp fresh out of the water, he had not the faintest idea. As he put more flounder in the sack at his waist, however, Baker did think about those Kamado Joe grills and how nice they would look on his rolling kitchen.
Christy caught shrimp for what seemed like a long time to her and was now gigging flounder at a frantic pace. She thought about her camera and what she would be able to accomplish with it. While photographers were everywhere, Christy’s talent was unique. Her photographs had already won awards, but Christy knew that there was only one camera that would produce the pictures she had in her mind . . . and that camera was expensive. How many fish could you trade for a camera? Christy did not know.
“Christy?” Jones called gently. “You need to move back in. Move toward shore a bit. Be sure to stay in shallower water, now especially. The current is
picking up with this tide, and you don’t want to be caught in it.” To the others in a louder voice, he announced, “Everything is beginning to wake up. I think you have less than ten minutes to work. Push yourselves just a little longer!”
Christy thanked Jones for the warning and turned toward shore. Though the sun was not officially up, it was fully daylight, and everyone was doing as the old man suggested: what they could, while they could.
Within a short time the three were milling about, attempting to capture the last of what they could see. They were talking excitedly about how the sea creatures had now seemed to wake up, shake off their sluggishness, and hightail it for deeper water. To their additional amazement, they looked at the sacks piled up on the small beach, and all agreed they had not put a dent in the numbers of fish and shrimp that had been under their feet for the past hour and a half. To a person, they thought, it looked as if there were as much flounder and shrimp in the water at the end of the jubilee as when it started.
Sealy and Christy were finished. Having stuck their gigs in the sand, they stood in a foot of water near the shore, watching Baker, who was close by, continuing to prowl along, looking for one last flounder.
“Baker,” Sealy called, “we voted, and you get to bring Christy’s little bus to us.”
“Okay,” Baker said with his head down, “but I’m going around, not through . . . Even if it’s around the world, I’m not fighting the Amazon jungle again to get that bus.”
They laughed just as Baker made a mighty lunge with his gig. Looking up with a big grin, Baker said, “Missed him. Ha! That is the first one I’ve missed, but it’s the first one I’ve seen swimming a hundred miles an hour! That’s it, I think. They are awake and too fast for me.”
